There's a bit of a difference between topology for characters, and topology for everyday objects like hard surfaces etc, and how you go about making it. This video is everything about topology for characters, mostly post sculpt. Just FYI for those watching. All good info though!
I wish I had this video when I was first starting out. I remember having to spend hours googling on topology for characters and best practices, but never getting much information out of the pros. I've learned a lot in practice, but this video has taught me a lot of things that I *didn't* know. One of the things I really appreciate is the breakdown in workflows between topology for real-time, and topology for offline rendering. I know the rules but never quite understood why those rules were in place, or how to apply them better.
This is great. As I’m staring on a path of learning 3D Modeling for 3D Printing and finding if I just throw polygons at my model it will be bloated in file size or take forever to slice for printing. Great stuff baked in here
Tremendous! I'm a techie doing hard surface models for engineering (but learning a little organic modeling for personal enrichment), and I learned so much from this lesson, even things that will apply to my hard surface work. Thank you for sharing your talent and experience so generously!
Great video! Currently prepping for an assignment where I'll be making a game-ready character, so your explanations from both perspectives of games and cinematics are super insightful, especially the tips on triangulation. In my degree (Game Design) they've mainly taught us from an animation perspective since the criteria have been based on the Creative Industries (Animation) degree, it's only in the past couple of years that they have been trying to factor in a games perspective.
Been modeling for over a year at this point, and this is probably the single most broadly useful video I've seen among the dozens of tutorials I've watched. Good Job!
Excellently structured vid. I’ve watched too many videos on topology that focus more on the tools rather than the methodology. This video is helping reinforce a lot of my learning thank you!
I'm an artist who is a beginner at 3d modeling and I need to learn quickly how to do this so that I can start making a video game. I really appreciate this
Hi J Hill. The best tutorial I've ever watched on Character Topology. I am using C4d and I have studies on human modelling. Maybe I know most of the elements you describe, but with this video, everything fell into place in my head. Thank you so much. Stay cool.
I really appreciate your explanation of quads vs triangles based on the necessary development process. I have studied a lot of professional game models, seen so many triangles, so I use them in my work to do just what you say: end loops and save verts. However, when people call me out on it I never really know what to say because I know it's okay to do, but I didn't know why. Now I understand that triangles are only bad if a mesh needs to be subdivided predictably, such as for cinema rendering!
One thing worth mentioning that some people forget about face - please, please have same amount of verts on both upper and lower eyelid half-loops - avoids getting eternal curse from the rigger because damn eye doesn't want to close:))
@@artofjhill Thank you :) Also what I think is good exercise - become a face rigger for a second, just grab the soft selection and try to "pose" the face - every beginner modeler can learn a lot trying to more or less sculpt blendshapes, as riggers we often (especially for more stylized characters, for realistic VFX stuff yes it often starts with painting crosses on someone and making 1500000 photos to Russian Wrap) don't user super advanced tools just push vertices around till it looks good - and it teaches immediately what all these loops around the eyes are for and how bad placement of poles can make getting good deformations without pinching and weirdness next to impossible.
Tip for smoothing Stars/poles in Zbrush: Hold Shift, begin smoothing w/ brush, RELEASE shift while continuing to smooth. This switches to an alternate smoothing algorythm that deals better with poles in topology.
Subscribed. I struggled to find a good tutorial on topology explanation on RUclips until I came across this video. It explains the concept very effectively. I hope those learning 3D modelling discover this video first, avoiding any confusion caused by incorrect or inaccurate tutorials.
u da best, i will definitly pay for a workflow from zbrush, blender, subtance to unreal + animations cuz its hard to find ! I think this is the most important part if u want to do some animations to ur videogame, but its to much! i need a break!
at 16:45, its mentioned that the mesh will be subdivided. might interest some people as to why its subdivided. you subdivide a model for the deplacement map. deplacement will pull polygons to make details. so you start from low-ish polycount to animate, block out etc. and come final render, the renderer will subdivide the model and pull geo with help from the displacement map. in that sense, if you're not working with displacement map, you dont actually have to subdivide the model. example, stylistic 3D animations, cell shaded animations, cartoonish looking stuff etc, anything you can get away with a normal map, which makes fake bumps. (as opposed to displacement map, which makes real bumps)
I think your missing the point. He is also talking about the smoothing subdivision that is used to smooth and round thing. Basically everything that is organic or round can be made at 1/8 or 1/4 or the final expected poly count. And then it get rounded only when required. To give an example imagine you make a leg out of a rectangle. Then you add a smoothing subdivision to make it round after on top of that you add a resolution subdivision for displacement or for sculpting details. These are independent feature added on top of each other.
100% about the triangle adding to ensure the quad is splitting the correct way, also important for baking that you know the triangulation is the same for the final model as the bake model to avoid artifacts later. When you import quads (non triangulated) into an engine its going to turn to triangles and some may be rotated (the dividing part of a quad) unless you export with triangulation checked or add it as a modifier to your stack / history. Fun times!
Wow!! Amazing video. I am an artist painter and art teacher and it would benefit all art teachers to learn topology when it comes to build a character or a figure. I am a complete newbie in 3D and got immediately hooked by how important is to understand topology. Your explanation is just marvelous, so thank you very much.
This was a great video!! Thank you so much for making it. I still had a couple of questions after watching it. First, why do you have a different polygroup for the jaw in the base mesh of the thumbnail? Is it so you can better sculpt the inside of the mouth? If so, what would be the best way to make it? Second, it still isn't clear to me what the most effective and efficient workflow is (not counting decimate or export for any of these): *Base mesh > subdivide > sculpt > retopo? *Blockout > light sculpt > ZRemesh > subdivide > Sculpt > retopo? *Dynamesh / Sculptris > retopo?
the jaw is a separate polygroup so I can quickly select it to work on the inside, and open the mouth yes. The most effective workflow is to sculpt with subdivisions. You could start with a basemesh that has good topology and subdivide that or start something from scratch using Dynamesh and then ZRemesh or retopo it some other way to make the final mesh that you will subdivide to finish sculpting with
@@artofjhill Thank you!!! This was one of the points that I felt most uncertain about because I didnt' want to do any unnecesary steps or do steps that would force me to back track and waste time. You're the best!
Can you make a video/tutorial on facial expression? (Tips and tricks) That would be really helpful. And quadruped topology maybe, for CG. I find it really confusing sometimes.
Absolutely the best explanation I've seen so far, and you've set the bar so high I really doubt I'm going to find a better experience for a long time. PLEASE KEEP IT UP IM LOVING THE DEEP LEARNING AND THE WAY YOU EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. 💯 😎👍
I have never created anything but I now have Blender installed and starting tonight. I understood everything in this video very easily and it inspired me to get started.
For someone is who is just starting out, understanding the basics of topology is pretty foreign. This was a great overview and made the subject very approachable. Thanks!!
Regarding polycount budgets, this is just my contribution. If your character has a lot of gear that tends to hide the body or cover it and break the silhouette often, a range of 90 to 200 k is reasonable. It seems like a lot, but that gear is not going to be conducive to a lower poly count. A lot of silhouette breaking objects like satchels, bandoleras , headbands, eyepatches, additional storage bags, skirts, knives, utility devices, etc is going to increase your polycount. No circumventing that. If your character tends to show the body silhouette off a lot more and there isn't much gear, a 50 to 100 k range is about right. eg. Commander Sheppard from ME2/ME3 or Cereza from Bayonetta. Having said that, Cereza's hair is likely another major character consideration. Keep in mind that hair cards can add to this and it varies wildly. More hair means more of a polycount to accommodate the additional mass on the low poly model. Go somewhat easier on a portfolio piece (Within reasonable bounds. Context matters finally). This is more of an issue during work.
This is a good video. I come from the Blender world, where the amount of misinformation is insane, and there are a lot of bad Blender topo videos on RUclips. It seems like all any Blender peeps learn about topo is "all quads!" and so then they do things like make degenerate quads instead of tris just so they can call it all quad. One of the more technical things that I didn't see you mention was knowing where your mesh was *planar* . I understand you're typically a game modeller, but the thing with poles really shows up when you start working with subdivided models, where poles/stars just don't subdivide right. Except-- as long as all of the faces are planar with all of their neighbors, it doesn't matter. So you end up putting poles where it's planar. And, in terms of sculpting, there are a lot of sculpting things that are doing similar things to subdivision (same algorithms, or derived algorithms), so that's why they don't do things right there either-- but yet again, if it's planar, it's fine. Then, what about animation? Once you start deforming a mesh, you don't know whether it's going to be planar anymore, right? So that's why you put the poles in places that aren't going to deform much: they're not going to go dramatically out of plane (the way that a lip vert might, for example.) And it's a balancing act: the more planar they are, the less it's going to look wrong, even if they're not perfectly planar. (Really, topo for deformation isn't something any different than topo for something static: you want edge flow that describes your shape. The complication is that your one topo is going to deform into a lot of different shapes-- but, not *every* shape, there are things you know the animator isn't gonna do. So you make edge flow that represents the shape in likely deformations.) I don't think it's particularly hard to UV map or weight a triangulated mesh (i just select shortest path, but it probably depends on your preferred program), but it's kind of hard to maintain good edge flow when you're modelling in tris. Using planar quads makes it clear what your effective edge flow is, for purposes of smooth shaded normals. (If they're not very planar, it doesn't help at all though.) You can triangulate the mesh afterwards, and it'll be fine, but if you work with triangulated meshes to begin with, what's the edge flow, which is the diagonal? It just doesn't end up working right.
Hi there, I just wanted to drop by & thank you for the treasure of knowledge I got from watching just this one video. You are a true professional & I can't thank you enough!
Your videos are gold for anyone who wants to know the aspects of 3D in depth. I learned a lot thanks to you. You are clear in your explanations and pleasant to look at. thank you for your work
Edge flow is important but polygon construction is always dependent on the needs of production. What is the model being used for? There is clean topology and then there is efficient topology. Those two things are always going to be conflicting with each other because an efficient model means more loop termination points, which means more poles. Both types are "good" depending on those needs. Vfx models with hyper real deforms tend to have less poles but at the cost of denser, more uniform size polygons. This is because there are advanced deforms intended underneath. Muscles, bones, etc. You don't split the loops for the elbow bone, for example, because the location of that boney area will slide around realistically around the skin. An efficient mesh is more common with sub-d models because the deforms are more cartoony, so minimal vertices are ideal when distributing bone weighting gradients. Those models can sometimes tend to use more aggresive displacement maps to bring back sculpt details, however, at the cost of less vertices to do detailed deformations.
Most cartoony faces (let's say """Disney""" style) won't be "efficient" because cartoony usually requires more extreme deformations for animation purposes and you want to make them look good. It's the edge case as much as digidouble with muscle sim.
@@shana_dmr That's true! vfx models the same. I did vfx character work for Atomic Fiction for awhile. Less poles, but denser cleaner uniform square meshes. Also takes into account 'sliding weights' for things like bones sliding under the skin.
Animation and unwraping are the main reason topology are important and polygone budget became less an issue especialy for static asset, except for mobile game and also keep a reasonable memory usage. Nice explanation of topology for human animation, i probably use some polygroup to make clean deformation zone.
Hey J! Since you talk a lot about facial animations and blendshapes in this video, it'd be quite cool if you could talk about blendshapes in real time renderers, where there isn't many polys, like for games. Thanks for these videos, they're a gift for everyone trying to better themselves in 3D. Precise and all encompassing :D
this is such a complete video, great information all around character modeling, amazing. Have you thought of making a video about SubD modeling? Currently learning that style of modeling
There's too much slightly incacurate info to correct but I will say threadripper isn't desktop it's HEDT (High-End Desktop) Epyc and Xeon are workstation. Most of about PCI-E lanes is true but current GPUs can't even saturate the bandwidth of an 8x PCI-E. But NVME can.
Totally very great video. I am diving into this and using Blender 3.4 with budget tools like Speedretopo. Reflow I will try next. But speedretopo is absolutely great to learn how to model partially manually. Why my quads turns to triangles and triangles newer ends all over the place. But J Hill just explained. First I thought I don't know something. Apparently it is normal to have challenges with manual topology. Thanks!
So this is the perfect Video for all Character Modeller.Thank You ! What i miss and thats a bit false leading on the Titel. It have to be "All you need to Know about Topology for Charakters" .If it comes to SubD hardsurface some of this changes. For example you need Topology for microdisplacment. And you have some other techincal aspects like Holding Edges for shaping and so on.
Yet another banger J!. I want to add for the poly count it's important to know your goal and at times your intended audience. The game I'm working on for example has a rough budget of about 10-20k triangles per character and it can be important of you have a portfolio to target polycounts for the projects you want to work for as well. I still have a bunch to learn as far as learning low poly and stylized workflows since I am coming into the field as a learned 2d artist , my self taught knowledge in 3d is somewhat limited so I figure that this could help someone maybe in the same position as I was in :)
Glad you liked it! Targeting what you want to work on and even more futuristic specs in your portfolio is absolutely what you should do and is good advice. Keep going!
Extremely helpful video! Great job! I'm only starting to learn modeling, but I see myself rewatching this in the future, when I better understand things to polish my skills. Have a great day! x)
Ok so one question. In school I used to always think you had to combine the topology of your model. Like if you make a tea cup the handle should actually be connected to the cup, etc. But lately with ZBrush I see artists just make the handle, lever, wing, pillar, etc. and just move it into place without actually connecting the topology. Is it actually important to merge your meshes or is this just some outdated thing I learned in school?
a rule of thumb for feature film quality is to have everything connected that is connected in real life as well. And in reverse also: everything that's separate should be separate as well. An example would be screws that should be separate, or certain panels etc. Another indicator are different materials like teeth and gum, or fingernails. In your example since the handle would most likely be glazed over or smoothed over a little bit there should be at least a slightly smooth transition so it would make sense to combine it. This would ensure that there are proper reflections where the pieces connect which become more visible the closer it gets. This applies at least to the hero objects (which are preferable for portfolio pieces)
I wish I would of found this years ago! I have learned so much from watching today! I had a little bit of understanding but I frustrated trying to find a good teaching video on topology This is the Video! I watched and took notes and snippets of examples. You really have opened my understanding on this subject and can't wait to start applying what I have learned. Thanks a million for this! I am going to have to get those books!
nice vid! When you talked about the grid lines and how they should ideally flow along creases and anatomy that will move certain ways, that made a whole lot of sense to my brain. comparing yours to the stock zbrush was also informative. Julie got ISSUES. heheheheh but then it was prob just a fast thing they added for people to play around with w/o animation in mind like you said. thx for the info!!!!
any chance of doing a video like this for texture? for real time and for animation. using udim vs multiple material slots. texture density etc. i like how you explain things professionally.
I like the idea of turning this into a series but it takes a lot of work to make one of these videos. So I want to but it'll probably be a while. looking to hire on people to help make more of these
@@artofjhill would you be posting the positions you need filled, your criteria and hiring requirements? though i myself is under qualified, it would still be nice to see how under qualified i am 😇
Thank you for this great video. I learnt a lot. You didn't cover topology reduction by using E-Pols and N-Pols. Reducing 4 faces to 2 for example. Some videos recommend those but I think they might be bad when you use subdivision (Which they never show). What is your opinion on that?
i wish you also went over some quadruped topology, i know in genreral its all the same principle but maybe some examples etc or talking about problem areas like skin fold between leg/belly. anyway great video i was a bit sad when it ended :d
Glad you liked the video. Quadrupeds would be super specific for sure but in general I’d say it’s like 4 shoulders in how all the legs move of that helps
All excellent points in your overview thanks for sharing. I use blender for all the aspects, ive made a base mesh with proper topo by poly modeling from a round cube, then with multires workflow I can sculpt unique characters off the base mesh, those sculpts could be heavy and do retopo if need be, or they could be simpler shape-keys for a morph system, etc, etc. Im still on the learning journey with everything, so I love your vid's.
@@artofjhill on a serious note, though, you have completely demystified the concept. Everyone kinda knows it's a big deal, but for people without industry experience, it is not clear what is meant by "good topology". Googling around a little you may find concepts like topology for subdivision/shading/animation but the way you elaborate exactly what each thing means in practice and breakdown everything with your knowledge and expertise, it's INVALUABLE..And all off that in 40 minutes! That's brilliant and probably painstaking work in terms of ideation and video production. HATS OFF TO YOU SIR.
"Hello, I'm seeking guidance on how to support my son, who is interested in realism and digital art. I came across your video and was wondering which editing software you use for your 3D art. Thank you!"
@artofjhill wow, thanks so much for a quick response. we will be sure to check it out and also any advice anyone can give to a serious young 3D arist. It will be greatly appreciated 👍
Honestly, you're a gift to the 3D art community.
Ha, I appreciate it
Agreed
@@artofjhill i am new here.
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
👋
There's a bit of a difference between topology for characters, and topology for everyday objects like hard surfaces etc, and how you go about making it. This video is everything about topology for characters, mostly post sculpt. Just FYI for those watching. All good info though!
that was gonna be comment so have a like random citizen
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
I wish I had this video when I was first starting out. I remember having to spend hours googling on topology for characters and best practices, but never getting much information out of the pros. I've learned a lot in practice, but this video has taught me a lot of things that I *didn't* know. One of the things I really appreciate is the breakdown in workflows between topology for real-time, and topology for offline rendering. I know the rules but never quite understood why those rules were in place, or how to apply them better.
Glad to hear you learned some things
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
This is great. As I’m staring on a path of learning 3D Modeling for 3D Printing and finding if I just throw polygons at my model it will be bloated in file size or take forever to slice for printing. Great stuff baked in here
Thank you man and your videos have helped me to understand more about 3D printing. I’m still very green at that. We should team up to make something
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Tremendous! I'm a techie doing hard surface models for engineering (but learning a little organic modeling for personal enrichment), and I learned so much from this lesson, even things that will apply to my hard surface work. Thank you for sharing your talent and experience so generously!
Thanks for the comment! Happy to hear you found it useful
Great video! Currently prepping for an assignment where I'll be making a game-ready character, so your explanations from both perspectives of games and cinematics are super insightful, especially the tips on triangulation. In my degree (Game Design) they've mainly taught us from an animation perspective since the criteria have been based on the Creative Industries (Animation) degree, it's only in the past couple of years that they have been trying to factor in a games perspective.
Glad to hear it was helpful. Good luck with your degree
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Been modeling for over a year at this point, and this is probably the single most broadly useful video I've seen among the dozens of tutorials I've watched. Good Job!
happy to hear it! have fun
Excellently structured vid. I’ve watched too many videos on topology that focus more on the tools rather than the methodology. This video is helping reinforce a lot of my learning thank you!
I'm an artist who is a beginner at 3d modeling and I need to learn quickly how to do this so that I can start making a video game. I really appreciate this
Np. Good luck
Hi J Hill.
The best tutorial I've ever watched on Character Topology. I am using C4d and I have studies on human modelling. Maybe I know most of the elements you describe, but with this video, everything fell into place in my head.
Thank you so much. Stay cool.
That’s great, I love to hear it helped. Good luck and happy modeling
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
I really appreciate your explanation of quads vs triangles based on the necessary development process. I have studied a lot of professional game models, seen so many triangles, so I use them in my work to do just what you say: end loops and save verts. However, when people call me out on it I never really know what to say because I know it's okay to do, but I didn't know why. Now I understand that triangles are only bad if a mesh needs to be subdivided predictably, such as for cinema rendering!
Glad I could help!
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
One thing worth mentioning that some people forget about face - please, please have same amount of verts on both upper and lower eyelid half-loops - avoids getting eternal curse from the rigger because damn eye doesn't want to close:))
Nice tip!
@@artofjhill Thank you :) Also what I think is good exercise - become a face rigger for a second, just grab the soft selection and try to "pose" the face - every beginner modeler can learn a lot trying to more or less sculpt blendshapes, as riggers we often (especially for more stylized characters, for realistic VFX stuff yes it often starts with painting crosses on someone and making 1500000 photos to Russian Wrap) don't user super advanced tools just push vertices around till it looks good - and it teaches immediately what all these loops around the eyes are for and how bad placement of poles can make getting good deformations without pinching and weirdness next to impossible.
after hours of trying to understand topology you finally made it make sense. Thank you so much.
I can definitely see the cheeky RGB blur around the edges of the screen. I also love that effect! 🌈
Tip for smoothing Stars/poles in Zbrush:
Hold Shift, begin smoothing w/ brush, RELEASE shift while continuing to smooth.
This switches to an alternate smoothing algorythm that deals better with poles in topology.
Thanks bro. I was trying to understand why I needed quads for game dev and this answered all my questions. Well done
that's the best video ever about topology! thank you, Jay!
Thanks Yulia :)
Subscribed. I struggled to find a good tutorial on topology explanation on RUclips until I came across this video. It explains the concept very effectively. I hope those learning 3D modelling discover this video first, avoiding any confusion caused by incorrect or inaccurate tutorials.
u da best, i will definitly pay for a workflow from zbrush, blender, subtance to unreal + animations cuz its hard to find !
I think this is the most important part if u want to do some animations to ur videogame, but its to much! i need a break!
Such a well made video Jay, the work you put into your channel shows! Picked up a copy of that stop staring book as well, thanks!
Thank you, glad to hear it and enjoy the book!
at 16:45, its mentioned that the mesh will be subdivided.
might interest some people as to why its subdivided.
you subdivide a model for the deplacement map.
deplacement will pull polygons to make details.
so you start from low-ish polycount to animate,
block out etc.
and come final render, the renderer will subdivide the model and pull geo with help from the displacement map.
in that sense, if you're not working with displacement map, you dont actually have to subdivide the model. example, stylistic 3D animations, cell shaded animations, cartoonish looking stuff etc, anything you can get away with a normal map, which makes fake bumps. (as opposed to displacement map, which makes real bumps)
I think your missing the point. He is also talking about the smoothing subdivision that is used to smooth and round thing. Basically everything that is organic or round can be made at 1/8 or 1/4 or the final expected poly count. And then it get rounded only when required.
To give an example imagine you make a leg out of a rectangle. Then you add a smoothing subdivision to make it round after on top of that you add a resolution subdivision for displacement or for sculpting details. These are independent feature added on top of each other.
@@leucome this ^
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
100% about the triangle adding to ensure the quad is splitting the correct way, also important for baking that you know the triangulation is the same for the final model as the bake model to avoid artifacts later. When you import quads (non triangulated) into an engine its going to turn to triangles and some may be rotated (the dividing part of a quad) unless you export with triangulation checked or add it as a modifier to your stack / history. Fun times!
💯
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Wow!! Amazing video. I am an artist painter and art teacher and it would benefit all art teachers to learn topology when it comes to build a character or a figure. I am a complete newbie in 3D and got immediately hooked by how important is to understand topology. Your explanation is just marvelous, so thank you very much.
Thank you for the nice comment! Glad you liked the video
This was a great video!! Thank you so much for making it. I still had a couple of questions after watching it.
First, why do you have a different polygroup for the jaw in the base mesh of the thumbnail? Is it so you can better sculpt the inside of the mouth? If so, what would be the best way to make it?
Second, it still isn't clear to me what the most effective and efficient workflow is (not counting decimate or export for any of these):
*Base mesh > subdivide > sculpt > retopo?
*Blockout > light sculpt > ZRemesh > subdivide > Sculpt > retopo?
*Dynamesh / Sculptris > retopo?
the jaw is a separate polygroup so I can quickly select it to work on the inside, and open the mouth yes.
The most effective workflow is to sculpt with subdivisions. You could start with a basemesh that has good topology and subdivide that or start something from scratch using Dynamesh and then ZRemesh or retopo it some other way to make the final mesh that you will subdivide to finish sculpting with
@@artofjhill Thank you!!! This was one of the points that I felt most uncertain about because I didnt' want to do any unnecesary steps or do steps that would force me to back track and waste time. You're the best!
@@artofjhill Oh! and apart from the jaw and eyelids, would you recomend any other parts of the face to have their own polygroup?
Two minutes in and I've just subscribed. I can tell this is going to be an amazing lesson.
Can you make a video/tutorial on facial expression? (Tips and tricks)
That would be really helpful.
And quadruped topology maybe, for CG. I find it really confusing sometimes.
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Absolutely the best explanation I've seen so far, and you've set the bar so high I really doubt I'm going to find a better experience for a long time. PLEASE KEEP IT UP IM LOVING THE DEEP LEARNING AND THE WAY YOU EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. 💯 😎👍
I have never created anything but I now have Blender installed and starting tonight. I understood everything in this video very easily and it inspired me to get started.
Glhf
Thank you so much for the free subscription, your work is extremely inspiring so here's hoping I can learn something new
Amazing video. Thanks for making it; I can feel the esoterica falling away a bit...
For someone is who is just starting out, understanding the basics of topology is pretty foreign. This was a great overview and made the subject very approachable. Thanks!!
You got it
Regarding polycount budgets, this is just my contribution.
If your character has a lot of gear that tends to hide the body or cover it and break the silhouette often, a range of 90 to 200 k is reasonable. It seems like a lot, but that gear is not going to be conducive to a lower poly count. A lot of silhouette breaking objects like satchels, bandoleras , headbands, eyepatches, additional storage bags, skirts, knives, utility devices, etc is going to increase your polycount. No circumventing that.
If your character tends to show the body silhouette off a lot more and there isn't much gear, a 50 to 100 k range is about right. eg. Commander Sheppard from ME2/ME3 or Cereza from Bayonetta. Having said that, Cereza's hair is likely another major character consideration.
Keep in mind that hair cards can add to this and it varies wildly. More hair means more of a polycount to accommodate the additional mass on the low poly model.
Go somewhat easier on a portfolio piece (Within reasonable bounds. Context matters finally). This is more of an issue during work.
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
This is a good video. I come from the Blender world, where the amount of misinformation is insane, and there are a lot of bad Blender topo videos on RUclips. It seems like all any Blender peeps learn about topo is "all quads!" and so then they do things like make degenerate quads instead of tris just so they can call it all quad.
One of the more technical things that I didn't see you mention was knowing where your mesh was *planar* . I understand you're typically a game modeller, but the thing with poles really shows up when you start working with subdivided models, where poles/stars just don't subdivide right. Except-- as long as all of the faces are planar with all of their neighbors, it doesn't matter. So you end up putting poles where it's planar. And, in terms of sculpting, there are a lot of sculpting things that are doing similar things to subdivision (same algorithms, or derived algorithms), so that's why they don't do things right there either-- but yet again, if it's planar, it's fine. Then, what about animation? Once you start deforming a mesh, you don't know whether it's going to be planar anymore, right? So that's why you put the poles in places that aren't going to deform much: they're not going to go dramatically out of plane (the way that a lip vert might, for example.) And it's a balancing act: the more planar they are, the less it's going to look wrong, even if they're not perfectly planar. (Really, topo for deformation isn't something any different than topo for something static: you want edge flow that describes your shape. The complication is that your one topo is going to deform into a lot of different shapes-- but, not *every* shape, there are things you know the animator isn't gonna do. So you make edge flow that represents the shape in likely deformations.)
I don't think it's particularly hard to UV map or weight a triangulated mesh (i just select shortest path, but it probably depends on your preferred program), but it's kind of hard to maintain good edge flow when you're modelling in tris. Using planar quads makes it clear what your effective edge flow is, for purposes of smooth shaded normals. (If they're not very planar, it doesn't help at all though.) You can triangulate the mesh afterwards, and it'll be fine, but if you work with triangulated meshes to begin with, what's the edge flow, which is the diagonal? It just doesn't end up working right.
I'm a solidworks CAD product designer. Came to your channel to find answers about the difference between topology and geometry and now I'm LOST 😂😂
Ha. It’s different?
year for all of us, for so- it's still ongoing. i respect you for being honest as that's what's been keeping a bit sane recently, just being
Great video!! Covered everything really well subbed!!
Hi there, I just wanted to drop by & thank you for the treasure of knowledge I got from watching just this one video. You are a true professional & I can't thank you enough!
Ears do need to be animated ever-so-slightly for realistic heads, so your model kind of works for that.
Thank you, this video is exactly what I was looking for ❤
I'm paying close attention because I'm in love with your face. I've learned more thanks to this. mostly because I'm very devoted.
Great stuff, mate. Very helpful video! Thanks!
Your videos are gold for anyone who wants to know the aspects of 3D in depth. I learned a lot thanks to you. You are clear in your explanations and pleasant to look at. thank you for your work
Thank you, I’m glad it helped
This is the best 3D modeling video I have ever seen. Thank you so much for the knowledge~!
Wow, thank you!
Edge flow is important but polygon construction is always dependent on the needs of production. What is the model being used for? There is clean topology and then there is efficient topology. Those two things are always going to be conflicting with each other because an efficient model means more loop termination points, which means more poles. Both types are "good" depending on those needs.
Vfx models with hyper real deforms tend to have less poles but at the cost of denser, more uniform size polygons. This is because there are advanced deforms intended underneath. Muscles, bones, etc. You don't split the loops for the elbow bone, for example, because the location of that boney area will slide around realistically around the skin.
An efficient mesh is more common with sub-d models because the deforms are more cartoony, so minimal vertices are ideal when distributing bone weighting gradients. Those models can sometimes tend to use more aggresive displacement maps to bring back sculpt details, however, at the cost of less vertices to do detailed deformations.
Most cartoony faces (let's say """Disney""" style) won't be "efficient" because cartoony usually requires more extreme deformations for animation purposes and you want to make them look good. It's the edge case as much as digidouble with muscle sim.
@@shana_dmr That's true! vfx models the same. I did vfx character work for Atomic Fiction for awhile. Less poles, but denser cleaner uniform square meshes. Also takes into account 'sliding weights' for things like bones sliding under the skin.
Your tutorial videos are amazing. I decided to go back to creating soft after 16 years. soft soft is so easy to get into, but also offers
Thank you sir. I was having a hard time understanding topology. Such a nice job!
Glad it helped!
Animation and unwraping are the main reason topology are important and polygone budget became less an issue especialy for static asset, except for mobile game and also keep a reasonable memory usage. Nice explanation of topology for human animation, i probably use some polygroup to make clean deformation zone.
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Hey J! Since you talk a lot about facial animations and blendshapes in this video, it'd be quite cool if you could talk about blendshapes in real time renderers, where there isn't many polys, like for games. Thanks for these videos, they're a gift for everyone trying to better themselves in 3D. Precise and all encompassing :D
thanks. I'll be getting into more real time animation soon hopefully
@@artofjhill I'll watch the video on an endless loop 😅
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
this is such a complete video, great information all around character modeling, amazing.
Have you thought of making a video about SubD modeling? Currently learning that style of modeling
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Thank you for sharing this. I´m always wondering if I'm doing topology right, this video helps a ton.🙏
great, love to hear it. Good luck! and have fun
Excalibur level delivery of concepts with real world application. Bravo brother!
Thank you man, I hope it helps with something!
Hi J Hill, your human topology tutorial is incredibly amazing! I want to ask, can you do a complete analysis of the Chris`s Jones Universal Human?
I hadn’t heard of it but just looked it up and it looks great!
I now understand why model in quads. Thank you.
25:09 😅
I keep coming back to this for reference every few months. Thanks for sharing this knowledge, Jay!
Awesome, I’m glad the video is helping. You got it
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Hands down the best topology video for characters!!
🙏
Great content, very informative. thank you!
Thanks for another great video J! Keep it up!
Heh you had me at "Alright so we're gonna get super nerdy in this video" xD
There's too much slightly incacurate info to correct but I will say threadripper isn't desktop it's HEDT (High-End Desktop) Epyc and Xeon are workstation. Most of about PCI-E lanes is true but current GPUs can't even saturate the bandwidth of an 8x PCI-E. But NVME can.
I really love retopologizing, and I most definitely love how to learn better and more efficient ways to retopo. This was an awesome vid~
Thank you! I have so much retopology you could do
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Totally very great video. I am diving into this and using Blender 3.4 with budget tools like Speedretopo. Reflow I will try next. But speedretopo is absolutely great to learn how to model partially manually. Why my quads turns to triangles and triangles newer ends all over the place. But J Hill just explained. First I thought I don't know something. Apparently it is normal to have challenges with manual topology. Thanks!
Amazingly useful & concise. A mini MasterClass. Thanks 🙏☕️🎩🎩🎩
Thank you so much for your explaination. Your way of teaching and speaking is so clear!
Happy to help. Gl
This one is a banger. I wish I knew this when I was a beginner.
🙏
great clean and concise
Cool video and simple explanation of the topic. I would like to see more videos like that ! keep going that way =)
So this is the perfect Video for all Character Modeller.Thank You ! What i miss and thats a bit false leading on the Titel. It have to be "All you need to Know about Topology for Charakters" .If it comes to SubD hardsurface some of this changes. For example you need Topology for microdisplacment. And you have some other techincal aspects like Holding Edges for shaping and so on.
exceptional, i get so much value from your videos
Thanks, glad you like them
Yet another banger J!.
I want to add for the poly count it's important to know your goal and at times your intended audience.
The game I'm working on for example has a rough budget of about 10-20k triangles per character and it can be important of you have a portfolio to target polycounts for the projects you want to work for as well.
I still have a bunch to learn as far as learning low poly and stylized workflows since I am coming into the field as a learned 2d artist , my self taught knowledge in 3d is somewhat limited so I figure that this could help someone maybe in the same position as I was in :)
Glad you liked it! Targeting what you want to work on and even more futuristic specs in your portfolio is absolutely what you should do and is good advice. Keep going!
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
Extremely helpful video! Great job! I'm only starting to learn modeling, but I see myself rewatching this in the future, when I better understand things to polish my skills.
Have a great day! x)
Hope it help. Glhf
Thanks, very good video, everyone starting out should listen to what you have to say.
Ok so one question. In school I used to always think you had to combine the topology of your model. Like if you make a tea cup the handle should actually be connected to the cup, etc.
But lately with ZBrush I see artists just make the handle, lever, wing, pillar, etc. and just move it into place without actually connecting the topology.
Is it actually important to merge your meshes or is this just some outdated thing I learned in school?
a rule of thumb for feature film quality is to have everything connected that is connected in real life as well. And in reverse also: everything that's separate should be separate as well. An example would be screws that should be separate, or certain panels etc. Another indicator are different materials like teeth and gum, or fingernails. In your example since the handle would most likely be glazed over or smoothed over a little bit there should be at least a slightly smooth transition so it would make sense to combine it. This would ensure that there are proper reflections where the pieces connect which become more visible the closer it gets.
This applies at least to the hero objects (which are preferable for portfolio pieces)
Congrats on 100k Jay. You have come so far and really deserve this.🎉🎉🎉
Thank you!
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
thank u ！！！the best topology viedo ever seen！
Glad to hear that!
I wish I would of found this years ago! I have learned so much from watching today! I had a little bit of understanding but I frustrated trying to find a good teaching video on topology This is the Video! I watched and took notes and snippets of examples. You really have opened my understanding on this subject and can't wait to start applying what I have learned. Thanks a million for this! I am going to have to get those books!
Happy to hear it and glad I could help! Glhf
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
nice vid! When you talked about the grid lines and how they should ideally flow along creases and anatomy that will move certain ways, that made a whole lot of sense to my brain. comparing yours to the stock zbrush was also informative. Julie got ISSUES. heheheheh but then it was prob just a fast thing they added for people to play around with w/o animation in mind like you said. thx for the info!!!!
Glad you liked it!
any chance of doing a video like this for texture? for real time and for animation. using udim vs multiple material slots. texture density etc. i like how you explain things professionally.
I like the idea of turning this into a series but it takes a lot of work to make one of these videos. So I want to but it'll probably be a while. looking to hire on people to help make more of these
@@artofjhill would you be posting the positions you need filled, your criteria and hiring requirements?
though i myself is under qualified, it would still be nice to see how under qualified i am 😇
subscribed and bought your base mesh! I have been looking for something like this for a while.
Thank you! Have fun
Thank you for this great video. I learnt a lot. You didn't cover topology reduction by using E-Pols and N-Pols. Reducing 4 faces to 2 for example. Some videos recommend those but I think they might be bad when you use subdivision (Which they never show). What is your opinion on that?
This video is golden! It's full of so much information, thank you!
Thank you! Great job! Finally there's a video, that explains the whole topic from a to z!
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
this could not have come at a better time, thank you J!
Glad to hear it, I hope it helps
i wish you also went over some quadruped topology, i know in genreral its all the same principle but maybe some examples etc or talking about problem areas like skin fold between leg/belly. anyway great video i was a bit sad when it ended :d
Glad you liked the video. Quadrupeds would be super specific for sure but in general I’d say it’s like 4 shoulders in how all the legs move of that helps
All important information bundled and presented with style. Well done 👏
Glad you liked it!
All excellent points in your overview thanks for sharing. I use blender for all the aspects, ive made a base mesh with proper topo by poly modeling from a round cube, then with multires workflow I can sculpt unique characters off the base mesh, those sculpts could be heavy and do retopo if need be, or they could be simpler shape-keys for a morph system, etc, etc. Im still on the learning journey with everything, so I love your vid's.
Happy to hear that. Keep it up
www.youtube.com/@Stylizedostudio
This was brilliant. Thank you.
Well I am a Professional Character Modeler and Animator, and this was still crazy helpful, Thanks man!
🙏
tons and tons of respect to you Jay
🙏
talent is getting f@@@d days by days
you are the true teacher. that's really help to make my career. thankyou very much.
Glad you find it helpful
Very clearly explained. Thanks.
Man this is wat I was waiting for!! Feels like u read my mind 😅
Glad to hear it, I hope it helps!
million thanks J Hill brother!
I hope it helps
Thank you, great structure.
Thanks so much for all the knowledge bombs. I feel so enlightened, I'm almost a different person from the one that hadn't watched this video 😵
I don’t know about all that lol but I’m glad you learned some things and liked the video
@@artofjhill on a serious note, though, you have completely demystified the concept. Everyone kinda knows it's a big deal, but for people without industry experience, it is not clear what is meant by "good topology". Googling around a little you may find concepts like topology for subdivision/shading/animation but the way you elaborate exactly what each thing means in practice and breakdown everything with your knowledge and expertise, it's INVALUABLE..And all off that in 40 minutes! That's brilliant and probably painstaking work in terms of ideation and video production. HATS OFF TO YOU SIR.
Thank you for this video and wish you all the best :)
"Hello, I'm seeking guidance on how to support my son, who is interested in realism and digital art. I came across your video and was wondering which editing software you use for your 3D art. Thank you!"
Zbrush and Maya
@artofjhill wow, thanks so much for a quick response. we will be sure to check it out and also any advice anyone can give to a serious young 3D arist. It will be greatly appreciated 👍
thanks a lot bro.. love from india
heya Jay this one is supa cool info as always you are one of the best of cg dudes
Thank you so much! It work!